This article describes a small victory that the right wing has been...

This article describes a small victory that the right wing has been able to secure over the last 5 years. It’s a small (but important) step forward, but it’s hard to communicate just how unheard of an alternative right-wing art scene would have been in past decades. There’s still much work to do, but watching this space grow is really encouraging.

A lot of people have asked me about “next steps”. That’s always a hard question. Certainly, the thing that I am looking forward to is some kind of Arts and Letters digest, a way to find the writers and artists that are at the top of their game in our spheres and what specific works people are talking about. This is something that Isaac Young has speculated would be helpful to promote fiction writing in this sphere. But while I certainly want something like this, it's an open question whether the time is right for this to come about. It certainly would be much harder than summarizing the new non-fiction and op-ed pieces the way that the New Right Post does, since reading fiction and appreciating art is much more time-consuming.

One thing that I realized being in these spheres now for almost 10 years is that certain community developments have to come about at certain times. The case that I always return to is a community building project I started in 2019 called the "Canis Society". This project was more-or-less defunct because it had horrible timing (pre-COVID), relied on discord (kept getting banned), and also tried to facilitate IRL community building in 2019 when people weren't yet aware of how important a project like this was for the right-wing generally. Altogether, even though the project failed, we learned a lot and we were able to come back post-COVID with several very successful community-building projects along the same lines (OGC, Beowulf, and Basketweaving).

For your project to work, people have to be ready for it.

This reminds me also of another project we attempted back in the day, recently discussed by John Arcto, the idea of creating an Alternative Wikipedia project. The idea of an alternative Wikipedia is good in the abstract, but it's way harder than it sounds on paper. Fundamentally, like all software projects, a wiki requires that there is a large regular user and support base in order to maintain (and fund) it. This is what Wikipedia has (and most other successful open-source projects), but is not something that is forthcoming on the right-wing currently. The lack of an end-user community is what has held back earlier projects like intergalactic by Vox Day, which, despite being a good idea in the abstract, I have never used mainly because I don't know what it is FOR. The thing is, building a wiki before you understand what community is going to be using it (and for what information) is futile. You need the community of end-users first, and the actual software second.

These lessons are good to keep in mind when we discuss how to build the next step of the burgeoning arts scene here. Just because we might want something, doesn't mean it's necessarily ready to be built. I think the "Arts and Literature Digest" digital periodical is a good idea, but I think it requires some preliminaries, specifically communities of readers or book groups that are regularly reading and consuming new literature and art from a dissident perspective. Or, to take things a step further, local events (large or small) that get people together around cultural interests. I think once we have a more definite community of people who consume right-wing art regularly, new opportunities may emerge. Perhaps building around the existing publishing houses like Passage Press might be a good start.

Still, it doesn't hurt to try building, just be tolerant of failure, and don't be afraid to try again, sometimes efforts are just premature.